By a queer pounding of his blood Bruce knew that he was in the high altitudes. He had already come six miles from the cabin. The hour was about six-thirty; in two hours more it would be too dark to make his way at all.
He examined the mud about the spring, and there was plenty of evidence that the forest creatures had passed that way. Here was a little triangle where a buck had stepped, and farther away he found two pairs of deer tracks,--evidently those of a doe with fawn. A wolf had stopped to cool his heated tongue in the waters, possibly in the middle of some terrible hunt in the twilight hours.
There was a curious round track, as if of a giant cat, a little way distant in the brown earth. It told a story plainly. A cougar--one of those great felines that is perhaps better called puma--had had an ambush there a few nights before. Bruce wondered what wilderness tragedy had transpired when the deer came to drink. Then he found another huge abrasion in the mud that puzzled him still more.
At first he couldn't believe that it was a track. The reason was simply that the size of the thing was incredible,--as if some one had laid a flour sack in the mud and taken it up again. He did not think of any of the modern-day forest creatures as being of such proportions. It was very stale and had been almost obliterated by many days of sun. Perhaps he had been mistaken in thinking it an imprint of a living creature. He went to his knees to examine it.
But in one instant he knew that he had not been mistaken. It was a track not greatly different from that of an enormous human foot; and the separate toes were entirely distinct. It was a bear track, of course, but one of such size that the general run of little black bears that inhabited the hills could almost use it for a den of hibernation!
His thought went back to his talk with Barney Wegan; and he remembered that the man had spoken of a great, last grizzly that the mountaineers had named "The Killer." No other animal but the great grizzly bear himself could have made such a track as this. Bruce wondered if the beast had yet been killed.
He got up and went on,--farther toward Trail's End. He walked more swiftly now, for he hoped to reach the end of Pine-needle Trail before nightfall, but he had no intention of halting in case night came upon him before he reached it. He had waited too long already to find Linda.